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Talks for Primary School Teachers

Posted by
Cuisenaire Company
on March 18, 2015

We are pleased to be able to offer a limited number of copies of the influential book by Madeline Goutard at a reduced price.

The book, Talks for Primary School Teachers, looks at the work of Dr Caleb Gattegno is a lucid commentary on the teaching approach to be adopted with the Cuisenaire Rods, written by a gifted teacher whose work with children has been a source of inspiration for many. This text includes valuable practical suggestions for classroom work.

These copies are available at a reduced price because of some slight staining by the staples, which have now been replaced.

This
book will be welcomed by everyone who teaches mathematics by the Cuisenaire-Gattegno
method. For here we have down-to-earth advice and a great deal of help from
someone who herself has a wide experience of the material. Psychologist and
educationalist as well as a practising teacher, Madeleine Goutard has
recognised many of the misconceptions and misunderstandings that can arise when
a new approach is introduced. She deals with each of these with a constructive
clarity which the reader soon recognises to be one of her most striking
qualities.

The
greater part of the book discusses the questions that spring to the mind of the
newcomer to the approach, and to the teacher with some experience of the rods.

Questions
such as:

Can children be introduced to
the rods at any stage in their schooling?

Do they become too dependent on
the material?

What is the role of
memorisation?

How can children acquire a
proper understanding of fractions?

The
author's advice is at all times practical and thoughtful. She suggests solutions
to classroom problems, but more than this, she gives us guidance on the
approach itself. "Anyone who takes up the Cuisenaire-Gattegno
method", she says, "breaks with ingrained habit and acquires an attitude
of research".

This
is not a textbook, nor an ABC of the rods, but a study in simple language of
the Cuisenaire-Gattegno approach to mathematics teaching.

Here is the original review by Dr Gattegno after the original publication.

This will be the fourth title in the Mathematics Teaching
Series published by Educational Explorers. In it an outstanding teacher has
made an invaluable contribution to education by putting in front of teachers
the evidence found in eight years of continuous study of what small children
can do in mathematics. While translating this book I was constantly cheered at
the thought of being able to make English-speaking teachers share my excitement
and joy in the contact of these many youngsters whose work forms the substance
of the evidence accumulated. Never has such massive evidence been put together
about so many sides of what is involved in learning mathematics. Never has the
case for a reappraisal of our attitude to mathematics in relation to the
learners and of children in relation to mathematics been made more eloquently.
Madeleine Goutard is a shy and cautious woman in so many of her manifestations
but here she appears as a thunder, forcing readers to take notice of what she says
about what she found. And what she found can be reached by everyone else whose
eyes are open and who meet children while they are learning mathematics in the
way it is possible today. The second part of the title of her book is the
explanation of the first. The author has been brought to write about
mathematics and children because she wants readers to reappraise their attitude
towards what ordinary children can actually do, if instead of being blindly led
in blind alleys, they are taken by competent and sensitive teachers into
activity that educates them, while producing mathematical knowledge as a
by-product. The author’s analyses of the various components of the encounter
with mathematics by young children makes fascinating reading by any standard and
parents as well as any adult engaged in the contemplation of the future will
find this book of great help in sorting out their ideas. The table of contents
is as follows:

Introduction

Ch I Dangers of empiricism

Ch II Mathematics writing, its elaboration from
'scratch'

Ch lll Naming and writing numbers in various
bases

Ch IV Techniques of calculation and mental
arithmetic

Ch V Applied arithmetic

Each chapter is full of insights as well as of data which
could become topics of discussion among investigators of modern educational and
psycho-logical theory. I find in this book, written in such clear language and
with almost no jargon, enough suggestions for research of the badly needed type
to recommend it specially to specialists, while the same subject matter makes
me warmly recommend it unhesitatingly to practising teachers at all levels of
education. Let me end this presentation by expressing my personal thanks to the
author for the deeper joys I was allowed to receive from this text by being its
translator besides having been its reader in the original manuscript.